Alan Gillis was born in Belfast in 1973. His fifth and newest poetry collection, The Readiness, is published by Picador in 2020. Of previous collections, Somebody, Somewhere won the Strong Award for the best first collection in Ireland, while Hawks and Doves was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2014 he was selected as a ‘New Generation Poet' by the Poetry Book Society in the UK. As a critic he has published Irish Poetry in the 1930s and The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Irish Poetry (both Oxford University Press), among other edited books and many essays. Previously editor of Edinburgh Review, he has lived and worked in Scotland since 2006, where he teaches at The University of Edinburgh.

Books by Alan Gillis:

Other poems on the web by Alan Gillis:
Three poems
"Progress"
"Morning Emerges out of Music"
"The Scattering"

Alan Gillis on Twitter.

About The Readiness:

"Gillis is the dark star of contemporary Irish poetry, and a major talent."
—Conor O'Callaghan

"Gillis gives contemporary poetry a much-needed shot in the arm; poetic language is vivified, made stimulating and vital, in poems that leave the reader hanging on for dear life over every expertly-executed turn."
—Maria Johnston

"Gillis's ... ability to take a hammer to polite pieties does not involve sacrificing the ability to write affectingly about how we live now."
—John McAuliffe

"The first time I looked into Alan Gillis's poetry, I was completely taken by it. Even though there was so much to take in at first glance, I was immediately hooked by its linguistic exuberance, its intelligence, its black humor, its sometimes zany flights of imagination that are grounded in an emotional reality … the poems are often gloriously funny, formally brilliant, jinking deftly between streetwise talk and mordant rhetoric."
—Ciaran Carson